Eurocommunism, socialism, modernization: the dilemmas of the left in eastern and western Europe

Review Article

GEORGESCH~PFLIN

Eurocommunism, Dilemmas

Socialism,

Modernization:

the

of the Left in Eastern and Western Europe

Vernon Aspaturian, Jiri Valenta, David P. Burke, eds, Eurocommunism between East and West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), ix + 373 pp. Wladyslaw Bienkowski, Theory and Reality: the Development of Social Systems, translated from the Polish by Jane Cave (London: Allison & Busby, 1981), viii + 303 pp. Ferenc Fehtr, Agnes Heller, Gyorgy Blackwell, 1983), xiv + 312 pp.

Markus,

W. E. Griffith, ed., The European Left: Itab, Heath, 1979), vii + 261 pp.

Dictatorship

over Needs (Oxford:

France and Spain (Lexington,

Oscar Gruenwald, The Yugoslav Search for Man: Marxist Humanism Yugoslavia (South Hadley, Mass.: J. F. Bergen, 1983), xii + 314 pp.

Mass.:

Richard

The Long March of the French Left (New

Kindersley,

York: St Martin’s

ed., In Search of Eurocommunism (New

York:

D. C.

in Contemporary

And& Hegediis, Lehetse’ges-e t&!nelmi kompromisszum Kelet-Eurdpa’ban? Alternatfv kijnyvek [samizdat], 1981), 280 pp. of typescript. R. W. Johnson, xv + 345 pp.

Basil

(Budapest:

Press, 1981),

St Martin’s

Press,

1981), xi + 218 pp. Peter Lange, Maurizio Vannicelli, eds, The Communist Parties of Ita&, France and Spain: Post-war Change and Continuity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), xii + 384 pp. Mark Rakovski (pseudonym of GyGrgy Bence and Jdnos Kis), ta’rsadalmak marxista s.zemmel(Paris: Magyar Fiizetek, 1983), 248 pp. STUDIESINCOMPARATIVECOMMUNISM 0039.3592/83/04/0275-12

$03.00 0

VOL.XVI,NO.~,WINTER~~~~,~~~-286 1983 University of Southern California

A szov$

tl;busli

S-rvnrks IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

276 George

Ross,

(Berkeley, Milan

Workers and Communists

Los Angeles:

Simecka,

University

Le rhablissement

in France: from

of California

de I'ordre: contribution

translated from the Czech by Catherine

Fournier

Popular

Front to Eurocommunism

Press, 1982), xvi + 357 pp. h la typologie

(Paris: Maspero,

du socialisme

rt!el,

1979), 213 pp.

There is and probably always will be a fundamental contradiction between Marxism as a philosophy and a method of analysis on the one hand and as a guide to political action on the other. Whereas the theoretical guidance provided by Marx and his successors can be relatively clear in the abstract, once Marxists have to grapple with the realities of political power, whether in liberal democracies or under ‘real existing socialism’, definitions become fuzzy, ideals are blunted and theoretical categories fail to match social and political structures. This is all the more frustrating for adherents of Marxist parties, because much of the attraction of Marxism is that it offers clarity and certainty, which is about the one phenomenon modern societies.

entirely

negated

by the political experience

of

A small but telling illustration of this complex of problems was an exchange during a seminar at St Antony’s College, Oxford in 1978 in the course of a series of papers on Eurocommunism, which subsequently saw the light of day as one of the books under review here.’ In the discussion following his paper, Manuel AZ&ate, the elegant and fluent theoretician of the Spanish Communist Party, was asked a pivotal question-in what way would the Spanish Party avoid the great dilemma of communist parties, indeed of the entire left, while in power: how to pursue a strategy that, while democratic, would amount to something more than ‘administering capitalism’? In other words, AZ&rate was asked to define what it was that differentiated from Social Democracy, what it was that still made it ‘communist’

Eurocommunism once these parties

had abandoned Leninism, abjured totalitarianism and espoused democratic habits. Despite his fluency (or perhaps thanks to it), AZ&rate had no satisfactory answer to this. Eurocommunism, Spanish-style, had no solution to the dilemma. The Spanish has since given its answer to the electorate, possibly sensing this contradiction, challenge

of the Spanish CP and has consigned

it, if not into oblivion,

at least to the

sidelines of Spanish politics. The conflict between theory and practice crops up over and over again in the relatively brief history of Eurocommunism and neither Eurocommunists nor their East European confreres have found any cogent way of resolving it. The East Europeans are, if anything more pessimistic. They seem ready to accept that ‘real existing socialism’ is fast approaching a situation in which very little of it will qualify for the label ‘socialism’. There is a virtual consensus that the present East European systems are variants of bureaucratic despotism, in which a single political organization-the party-has elevated its own survival in power to be the supreme goal of the system and subordinates all else to this.2 The singlemindedness of East European parties is noteworthy here. They have been prepared to tolerate every kind of inefficiency, mal-

l. Manual Ax&ate, ‘The Present State of Euro-communism: its Main Features, Political and Theoretical’, in Richard Kinder&y, ed., In Search ofEurocommunism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981). The exchange referred to is not, however, part of the book and derives from the reviewer’s memory. 2. WIadysYawBiefikowski, Theory and Reality (London: Allison & Busby, 1981) and Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative rn Easfern Europe (London: New Left Books, 1978) provide two very different examples.

277

Eurocommunism, Socialism, Modernization feasance,

deviousness

and

intellectual

turpitude

in the

singular

pursuit

of this

objective. There are, of course, differences in the actual practice of this pursuit of power. The different political contexts of different East European parties predictably provoke varying responses from local analysts. The Poles have tended to stress the erosion of the system and the burgeoning corruption of its beneficiaries in the elite. In Hungary it is the shrinking of intellectual horizons, the constriction of political thought and the barely perceptible but unmistakable moral decay that has attracted attention. Czechoslovak writers have tended to emphasize the all-pervading depressiveness of the dispensation under which they have lived since the Prague Spring. One of the most trenchant of these has been Milan SimeEka, whose dissection of the practice of ‘real existing socialism’ dwells on the authoritarianism of the system and the irrelevance of the ideology on which it is supposedly founded.3 Today under real socialism, the workers to Marx

because

that the greater the teachings unknown

Marx

it has to manage

of Marx.

to them.

certainly

method,

but in practice

for them, antagonisms

and interpreting

economy.

of the Marxist

know that Engels

they follow the principle

the crisis

consist of a few principles

above the heads of

An honest survey would reveal party have not the least idea of

And I’m afraid that the revolutionary

They

carried

The party does not have the time to devote

the national

part of the functionaries

opinion;

socialism

is no more than a portrait

at the First of May parades.

of nipping

derived from contradictions

of the capitalist

world.

and rules elaborated

pathos of Lenin

had as a hobby

The

is equally

a kind of dialectical

in the bud all differences

of

are only a means of depicting methods

of everyday

on the basis of the lengthy practice

and which depend in the first place on the empirical

evolution

politics of real

of the economy

and politics.

The current practice of ‘real existing socialism’ is evidently and understandably an issue of vital concern to East Europeans who live under the system and who have sought to conserve their Marxist ideas. Some of them chose to take a long, hard look at the system and opted out of Marxism in favour of opposition based on the ideas of democracy and human rights, while remaining within the broader tradition of socialism.’ They came to constitute the core of the founders of the democratic opposition movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary and they are apparently beginning to emerge in the somewhat different context of Yugoslavia.5 A few of these East European Marxists, however, have opted for attempting to see what could be rescued from the wreck of their idealism and to analyze, using the methods bequeathed by Marx, where the derailment of the system occurred. With something

close to unanimity,

these Marxist

or Marxian

found some, if not all, the answers to their questions

analysts of the system have

in the legacy of the Asiatic mode

3. Milan .%neZka, Le re’tabhssementde i’ordre (Paris: Maspero, 1979) quotation from p. 185. Simefka’s ideas are also available in abbreviated form in English in an article in InternationalJournal of Politics, XI, I (Spring 1981), pp. 16-38. 4. ‘Marc Rakovski’, the pseudonym adopted by the Hungarians Gyb;rgy Bence and Jrinos Kis is a good illustration. Their book, Towards an East &ropean Marxism {London: Al&son & Busby, 1978) is clearly within the Marxist canon; the Hungarian edition of this work, A szoujel tip& ta’rsadnfmk mnrxistn sammel (Paris: Magyar Fiizetek, 1983) is accompanied by a note in which the authors reveal their identity and their detachment from Marxism. 5. Oskar Gruenwald, The Yugoslau Search&r Man: Marxist Humanism in Contemporary Yu&auia (South Hadley, Mass.: J. F. Bergen, 1983) looks at some of these themes in the overall matrix of contradictions between theory and practice.

278

STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM

of production and the excessive dominance of the state over society in the countries where communist revolutions took place. The consequence of this preeminence of the state was that civil societies never developed the strengths

found in the West and the

state was successful in constructing a more far-reaching system of power than was foreseen in the Marxist classics. If this appears to vindicate Marx himself, who was more than a little scornful at the proposition that Russia could avoid the travails of capitalism and move directly to socialism, this is almost coincidental. What is particularly striking in the writings of East European Marxists is that they appear more open-minded and flexible in their search for answers to the problem, and ready to jettison large quantities of the classics as mere ballast. Lenin, in particular, has been tacitly dropped from his role as pilot in favor of other, not necessarily Marxist writers: Max Weber, although very seldom mentioned notably on the work of And& Hegediis. Whether Weber

directly, has his influence and other political theorists

will be sufficiently influential to infuse a new burst of steam into the rather limping vessel of so much of East European political thought is another matter, especially since these ideas, unless they are written for samizdat, have to be camouflaged the iron-clad requirements of Marxist-Leninist language. In samizdat,

on the other hand,

anything

goes-at

in order to fit

any rate in theory,

for despite

freedom from the censor many of the theoretical analyses produced in Eastern Europe since the emergence of the opposition have tended to remain closely within the magic circle of Marxist-anti-Marxist

ideas (as distinct from non-Marxist

thought).

At times,

these have diverged substantially from Marxist orthodoxy-the rise of the Asiatic mode of production as an instrument of interpretation is one example, whilst the attention paid in Hungary to the writings of Karl Polrinyi is another-but wide tracts of Western political thought are largely unknown in Eastern Europe or at least they were unknown until the early 1980s. The most recent phenomenon in Czechoslovakia in this sphere of the unofficial intellectual world has been the explosion of samizdat translations of a quite bewildering spectrum of non-Marxist theorists of politics and society, notably Dahrendorf, Hayek, Popper and Oakeshott. This process does not appear to be nearly as advanced as in Poland or Hungary, possibly because official censorship has permitted a wider cross-section of theoretical works to appear; all the same, the emergence of Istv6n Bib6, possibly the most original political thinker in Hungary during this century as a major inspiration for unofficial opinion, represents a milder variant of the same phenomenon. The acceleration of this process in Czechoslovakia can probably be explained by the purges of the 1970s which left a very large number of intellectually active people on the wrong side of the political tracks. The size of this group is in itself significant, as it is highly likely that they came to constitute

a kind of ‘critical

mass’,

both as translators

(having a knowledge of languages, an interest in speculative thought and the will to think beyond everyday existential problems) and as consumers of these translations (a large and ravenous market for intellectual goods of quality exists as long as there is a party determined to keep official output as dreary as possible). The situation in the German Democratic Republic is at once better and worse as far as intellectual diversity is concerned. The relevant material largely exists in German; the interest in it does not. Bahro and Havemann operated strictly within Marxist categories and there is no evidence of interest in non-Marxist thought in their workh-still, it cannot be excluded 6. Bahro, however, was influenced by Wittfogel’s Ork~tal Dezpottsm in the analysis he put forward in The Alternativein ,Eas~n Europe, albeit Wittfogel’s name is nowhere mentioned explicitly. Subsequently Bahro explained that he omitted Wittfogel because he hoped to have his ms. published officially.

Eurocommunism, Socialism, Modernizahon that the GDR

279

will remain immune for ever.

One of the central problems for both East European and Western analysts of their respective systems is to define what is systemic and what is politico-cultural, insofar as the problem confronts each system these categories can be separated. Naturally, differently. Eastern Europe must disentangle the theoretical residue of its political legacy of the interwar and pre-World War I periods, which had already seen the emergence of a strong state and a hegemonial role for the state bureaucracy, but with elements of pluralism surviving in this system. The question then is to decide whether the authoritarian practices of ‘real existing socialism’ are in any way derived from this Ctatist tradition (which is a reasonable assumption) and to what extent something new was forged by the communist revolution. This distinction is vital, for these analysts are anxious to stress the importance

of human rights and democracy

in both the European

and local traditions, not least as an instrument to legitimate their aspirations in this direction. The pressure for democratization is, at the same time, underpinned by reference to the democratic and humanistic elements in the Marxian tradition. For Eurocommunists, the core of the problem is analogous, but the elements that must be disentangled are somewhat different. practice of the bourgeois democratic

Here the issue is how much of the democratic state is attributable to its ‘bourgeois’ character

and to what extent democracy is autonomous of bourgeois an immanent feature of Western political practice.

political culture and simply

In this context, however, Eurocommunists have to struggle with a persistent and ultimately detrimental feature of Marxism, let alone Marxism-Leninism, namely its ineluctable tendency to oversimplify the nature of politics. Just as Marx himself was inclined in this direction, the economic rationality

inasmuch as he came perilously close to the assumption that of an enterprise could be projected onto an entire state

economy, so his successors-especially Lenin thought to create the crude, though fascinating,

and Stalin-continued this line of simplicities of the model associated

with them. Marx initiated this process by seeking the source of all social action in the economy.

He thereby

set up a system which encapsulated

a vision of perfection

and

perfectibility, something which his successors pursued in real politics (as distinct from theory). The particular contribution of Lenin and Stalin to the problems with which Marxists have to wrestle today was the russification of Marxism and the consequent creation of what has been termed the ‘Nicholas I model of socialism’ .’ The model that emerged from the experience of War Communism and the NEP was evidently aimed at the solution of problems faced by Stalin in the 1930s-the rapid construction of a large industrial base capable of supporting a major military establishment. These relatively short term objectives were elevated by Stalin as immanent features of the socialist revolution and socialist theory, the Andropov leadership.

and as such they remain

in the perception

The trouble with this system lay not merely in its short term, contingent

of

character-

after all, the building of an industrial base need not take for ever-nor even in Stalin’s ability to enforce absolute theoretical obedience to it wherever communists lived, moved and had their being; rather it lay in its crudity. The specifically Russian characteristics of the model only exacerbated this. The model was crude because in political, social and economic terms it was restricted to the achievement of a few quantifiable 7. This was attributed to the Czech publicist Jan Procha’zka, who played a prominent role in the Prague Spring and died shortly thereafter, in 197 1. A collection of his articles appeared that year, Solange uns Zeit bleibt (Recklinghausen: Georg Bitter Verlag, 1971).

280

STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM

objectives, universal

such as the massive electrification.

expansion

of steel production

Not only are these relatively

or coal extraction

straightforward

or

tasks involving

simple technologies, but also, in concentrating on them exclusively and obsessively, the model was aimed, consciously or not, at cheap successes. Electrification is easy; main drainage is far more costly and difficult, so the latter has tended to be neglected in the agenda of Soviet-type systems. Similarly mining and quarrying pose few tasks of complexity and production targets are fundamentally achieved by an indefinite series of finite actions; by contrast, the maintenance of infrastructure, such as irrigation channels or roads, demands constant attention and technological literacy, on which this model does not place a premium.

What is more, the states of ‘real existing socialism’

have found it extremely difficult to update the agenda incorporated in the model, with the result that even in economic terms it has tended to lag behind the West and to show a low adaptability to new challenges. The picture in the political realm is cruder still. The one lasting innovation brought to Marxism by its Russian reinterpreters has been the unique concentration of power in the hands of the party. The definition of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat has produced a system of rule that is successful solely in terms of power concentration, something which is squarely in line with the Russian political tradition but at variance with that of the West.a The party as the repository of sole power has been crucial in enabling the system to survive, albeit at the cost of blocking all meaningful reform, institutional

change and deconcentration.

In essence,

therefore,

what the Soviet-type

system produces most successfully is power. This takes precedence over all other ostensible goals, including the fostering of economic growth and capital accumulation, let alone the satisfaction of the aspirations of the citizenry. There is very little that a Marxist reformer can do with this legacy, except to commit himself to its radical transformation; unfortunately, as many of this species have discovered, there are some supervening exogamous variables, notably the Red Army, preventing this. It hardly needs to be added that the penchant for simplification also extended to society and social analysis. The classic two-and-a-half

schema of workers, peasants plus

intellectuals, while seductive to social engineers in its apparent simplicity, was never particularly apposite in Eastern Europe, where the process of modernization, and thus had begun well before the communist revolution, of ever increasing complexity, as the most tenacious aspects of power despite local variations. Interestingly, concentration started to recede in the 196Os, this two-and-a-half schema was quickly broken and sociological analysis of considerable sophistication began to see the light of day. Nevertheless, despite the acuteness of much of this analysis, policy makers paid little heed to it and ignored findings that, for example, the communist system itself created certain types of inequality, even while it might have eliminated others. The proposition that in some way complexity and conflicting interests, whether social or economic, should be reflected in the political system has invariably received a dusty answer, both from local holders of power and from their patrons in the East. The intelligentsias of Eastern Europe might be fully aware of this problem and have come forward with all manner of suggestions for ameliorations, but whenever these threatened the monopoly of the party, social reality gave way to political reality. Poland in the early 1970s is as good an illustration as any: for in spite of pressure from 8. An excellent historical and intellectual analysis of these different political traditions is by Jet16 Sziics, Szemle, XXIV, 3 (1981). pp. 313-357. The article ‘V&&t Et&pa hirom tdrt6neti rCgi6jjrir61’, T~rtbdmi first appeared in samizdat in Bib6 EmlCkkonyv (Budapest, 1980).

Eurocommunism, the intelligentsia

281

Socialism, Modernization

to adopt a more decentralized

system of economic

power elite vetoed this as a step towards the deconcentration

management,

the

of its power. No one likes

giving power away. Thus, give or take a few East European sociologists, the real structure of society and real questions as to who benefits and who suffers disadvantage are seldom allowed to impinge on the consciousness of the protagonists of ‘real existing socialism’. The difficulties created by the pattern of industrialization adopted perforce in Eastern Europe

and resultant

inequalities,

consumption, the disadvantages and possibly-most tellingly-the

the persistence

of differential

access to collective

of age, differential health and educational provision, inability of the state to provide and maintain infra-

structure evenly have all contributed to considerable, deep-seated and seemingly insoluble inequalities which because of the monopolistic political system can hardly be ventilated. In official terms, these problems are either relics of the bourgeois past-as if Eastern Europe had ever actually been ruled by a bourgeoisie-or are the consequences of temporary hiccoughs in the system, just conceivably caused by the distortions left over from the Stalinist period. The possibility that they may be inherently located in ‘real existing socialism’ itself is simply dismissed, as it has to be, for the proposition undermines the diminishing claims of the system to legitimacy.g Political or semi-political questions such as over-regulation and bureaucratism are treated symptomatically; Nor is there

much the same applies to corruption.

much evidence

of preparedness

to look beneath

the surface

of the

question of scarcity, even though the outstanding Hungarian economist Janos Kornai has published a major work devoted to this topic. lo There is no mystery about the factors reproducing scarcity to economists, but equally there is no will to effect changes, because these would undermine political control. Kornai and others have demonstrated beyond challenge that scarcity is an output of the functioning of the system; the official response of the system is to define it as transitional, and attribute blame to factors beyond East European control-like the world economy. The possibility that scarcity in the economic realm may be a product of scarcity in politics-restricted access to political power-is outside the limits of discussion. A separate but connected aspect of this problem is that East European political strategies place greater emphasis on redistribution

than on growth.

The system claims to deal equitably

with all the

demands made on it and to have the most rational criteria for effecting redistribution. In practice, because growth is low or gravely tilted in the direction of heavy industrial output, consumption suffers and has continued to suffer despite the reforms of the 1960s. The proportion of investment in industries providing for the consumer market may have increased, but low growth and political monopoly have prevented the kind of wide-ranging access to consumption which East European societies have increasingly come to feel they should have. The stranglehold exercised politically over redistribution also means that the elite is exempted from deteriorations in the standard of living -witness

Poland in 198041.

The resultant

inequality

was recently justified

to me in

9. Ferenc FehCr, Agnes Heller, GyGrgy Mdrkus, Diclatorshzp DLWNeeds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) is *a subtle and penetrating enquiry into the nature of East European political systems by three Hungarian Marxist critics of the rCgime who moved to Australia in the 1970s. This work is clearly influenced by nonMarxist ideas, as well as demonstrating the authors’ own changing analytical approaches. 10. Jinos Kornai, A hi&y, 2nd edition (Budapest: KGzgazdasa’gi 6s Jogi K&yvkiad6, 1982); an English language translation has appeared under the title, The Economics ofShortage (Amsterdam/New York: NorthHolland, 1980).

282

STUDIES

private conversation

IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

by an East European:

‘But this is nothing more than the way in

which the elite rewards itself. ’ All these various shortcomings of ‘real existing socialism’ have contrived something of a dilemma for Eurocommunists. l1 To what extent should they distance themselves from the Soviet-type

systems and avoid the Scylla of diluting

their own policies so

thoroughly that they end up with something that is in no way recognizably communist or the Charybdis of tying themselves to political allies abroad that are manifestly bad advertisements for communism? The dilemma has been present ever since the Soviet Union hijacked the Marxist tradition in the 1920s and enforced the colonization of Western

parties by its own singular

political

style and content.

On the whole,

the

Eurocommunists have failed to confront this dilemma and have responded rather as Manuel Azcarate did in 1978 (see supru). Their response to the challenge of the nature of ‘real existing socialism’ has been more than somewhat ambiguous. This may partly be ascribed to sentiment of the Soviet-type reformist Marxists

and the residue of past solidarity;

system lies precisely in Eastern Europe-the

in the feature concentration

partly because the attraction most strongly criticized by of power, which has always

fascinated politicians and intellectuals; and partly there has been political calculation on the part of Eurocommunist leaderships, inasmuch as a complete severance of ties to the Soviet world would leave them isolated internationally and would produce a major conflict with their own pro-Soviet militants, with the attendant risk of disruption. This last has already befallen the Finnish and Spanish parties. Over and above these political dilemmas, there are strategic question marks over Eurocommunism which have been highlighted by the experience of Eastern Europe, but which have barely been identified in the Eurocommunist canon. These turn on what must be regarded as the crucial issue for the left in Europe-what is it that socialism consists of and what does it offer as a guide to the future and as an alternative to the existing liberal democratic

dispensation

that will produce a genuine transforma-

tion. The difficulties confronting the Eurocommunists in this realm are numerous, whether or not they are actually identified as such. So, for one, there is the problem of how Eurocommunists should respond to modernity. If there is one area in which the socialist tradition has claimed a mission and declared its superiority to capitalism, it has been precisely in the field of offering a vision of a better society. In essence, the message of the left is that its strategy will offset and overcome the dehumanization that is the inevitable concomitant of modernization. Socialism has set itself up, explicitly or implicitly, as the doctrine of the future that will remedy the soullessness of the Geselland recreate the lost Gemeinschuft of intimate schuft, atomized and bureaucratized, human relations, give the individual control over cause and effect and eliminate the sense of being at the mercy of uncontrollable, remote forces under conditions of modernity. In practice this has not happened. But the lesson of the experience is that from the starting point adopted by the Eurocommunists this cannot happen, at any rate not 11. Chapters in the following collections offer definitions of Eurcommunism: V. Aspaturian, ‘Conceptualizing Eurocommunism: Some Preliminary Observations’, in V. Aspaturian, Jiri Valenta, David P. Burke, eds, Eurocommunirm between East and Wesf (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980) is solid and workmanlike. David McLellan, ‘Theoretical Roots of Liberal, Democratic National Communism’, in Howard Machin, ed., N&ma1 C~mmunmn ia Western Europe: a Third Wayjor S&&m (London: Methuen, 1983) is an elegant and thorough survey, whilst Peter Lange and Maurizio Vannicelli, eds, The Communixf Parfm ofIfaly, lkn~ce nndSparn: Posfwar Change and Confinuify (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981) is an excellent sourcebook.

283

Eurocommunism, Socialism, Modernization

without a major re-evaluation of ideology, strategy and tactics. The first problem lies in the strategy of the conquest of power adopted by Eurocommunists and the program of action based on it. They have tended to leave the question

of what is the role and

function of socialism under conditions of modernity somewhat vague and have preferred to create their own countervailing power structures, institutions and bureaucracies within the existing political framework. But because these are obliged to operate

in what are regarded

as essentially

alien and hostile environments,

with the

agenda set by their opponents, the Eurocommunists have generally done little more than reproduce power structures to compete with bourgeois democracy. Thus there are trade union power centers to match entrepreneurial power centers and other similar structures.

Consequently,

the left has been unable to escape from this circle, in which it

inevitably operates less efficiently than its opponents and it has shown fewer signs of wanting to do so as it becomes seduced by power. This has had two consequences: in the first place, it has grown increasingly conservative; tension between ideals and practice, Eurocommunist

and second, because of the latent and other left-wing parties in the

West have been inclined to lapse into dogmatism and to reject the positive elements of liberal democracy as ‘bourgeois’. There is more than a hint in the history of Eurocommunist parties that they have become attracted by power for its own sake, something which they hide under a veil of ideological rhetoric. A second general feature of Eurocommunist parties again sheds light on an aspect of politics which is almost universally ignored-in Eastern Europe as well as in the West. There is an automatic assumption that the working class, on which the entire edifice of socialist politics rests, is inherently

committed

to democracy.

This assumption

deserves

closer scrutiny. There is a key passage in Hegedus’s collection of papers issued in samizdat in which he discusses various types of personality in the sociological sense and argues that for a section

of the working

class, participation

in the institutions

and

rituals of the communist party, for all its anti-democratic character, is an authentic experience and there is genuine identification with that experience.12 In reality, there is a type of person

who is comfortable

with a restricted

political

status

in a strict

hierarchy. There is no logical reason to suppose that this type of worker exists only in Hungary; on the contrary, it is evident enough that at least a part of the membership of the Eurocommunist parties, the French above ah, falls into this recognizable category. l3 This constitutes a reservoir of anti-democratic conservatism with which Eurocommunist parties have to reckon. The implications of this problem merge into the third feature of Eurocommunism pointing inwards rather than outwards, namely the particular occupational categories on which Eurocommunist support rests, again notably in France. The left has traditionally looked to nationalization

as a primary instrument

of left wing politics and large

portions of industry and services have been taken into state ownership. State ownership provides automatic protection for the employees of this sector against the imperatives of the market, manning and

with the result that they rapidly acquire a vested interest in overinefficient practices-a kind of bureaucratization of work. Euro-

12. Andris Hegediis, L&&&s-e t&S&ni kompromzarum Kelet-E&p&an? (Budapest: Alternativ Konyvek, 1981), p. 107. 13. Both George Ross, Workers and Communists in France:from Popular Front to Eurocommunwn (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982) and R. W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981) bear this out, regardless of their own rather different approaches to the overall problem of the place of the left in France. The latter contains some excellent sociological data on the changes in French society and the consequences of this for the French party.

284

STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

communist parties equally automatically regard the protection of these workers as a key feature of the class struggle, so that a fairly straightforward patron-client relationship emerges. This can go a stage farther, when the relevant party will try to set the agenda for the state in that sector of industry, in order to make sure that market conditions are not made to apply to it. The fact that as a result taxpayers are obliged to subsidize this protected environment and its inhabitants and that in consequence, there is a steady transfer of resources from the less well off sections of the working class to its somewhat better off sections is conveniently overlooked. The fourth problematic feature of the Eurocommunist strategy of politics concerns the attitude of the left to conflict and change. There is nothing specific in the Marxian legacy in this regard to predispose left-wing parties to consider change and conflict with a jaundiced eye. Nevertheless, there is much to be said for the argument that this is not too distant from their present attitudes. Some of this is certainly attributable to the period of Soviet colonization. However successfully Eurocommunist parties may have emancipated themselves from their relationship with the Soviet Union, the years that they have spent regarding the Soviet politico-cultural method of operation as identical to the Marxist one have left their mark; and that mark, as argued above, is one of suspicion of, if not actual hostility to, change. The sense that change is controlled by antagonistic

outside forces will similarly tend to reinforce this attitude. Just as there is a

certain propensity to confuse ‘bourgeois values’ and ‘democratic values’, so there is an analogous inclination to distrust conflict as something generated by a hostile conspiratorial value system and, therefore, usually unstated,

to dismiss it. The ideal world of the socialist vision,

may well consist of a static rather than a dynamic vision of society, at

least at the subconscious level of political futurity. This set of values may well be what translates itself as the left’s readiness to achieve its aims by regulation and imposed discipline, in preference to the emancipation of theory. Insofar as this analysis is tenable-and the evidence marshalled in the books under review is formidable-Eurocommunist parties are caught in a trap, which leaves them facing modernity-change, complexity and conflict-with uneasiness and distaste. On the other hand, they draw on this as a source of support, for in every society there is a constituency of people reluctant to confront change, to meet the challenge of the unfamiliar and repeatedly exercise choice. A certain element of the left’s input into politics has always relied on this. Next, there is another key question of values and attitudes in Eurocommunism,

as

well as ‘real existing socialism’, which demands attention. It is virtually axiomatic to regard socialism and anti-capitalism as identical phenomena. This is not necessarily quite as straightforward as it appears at first sight. For a start, this proposition ignores the long tradition of non-socialist anti-capitalism in politics, which may be conservative, populist, nationalist or religious. The coalescence of left- and right-wing anticapitalism on the European left has unquestionably existed and continues to explain some of the paradoxical responses of Eurocommunist parties, notably their determination to defend the nation-state, a unit within which a protected environment can potentially be created with the aim of excluding international

market forces. ‘*

14. Giuseppe Sacco, ‘The Views of the Left in Italy and France on International and Domestic Economic Issues’, in W. E. Griffith, ed., The European Lej: Italy, France and Spain (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1979) tackles the question of protectionism and competition in an excellent paper. Sacco points out that the Italians have adopted a strategy quite different from that of the French in domestic economics and have abandoned nationalization, as they feel that the state sector in Italy is large enough as it is.

Eurocommunism, In hard terms, the reduction

of socialism to anti-capitalism

The way in which Eurocommunist about the socialist millennium -this that they make the distinction socialism and anti-capitalism, congruence,

285

Socialism, Modernization

produces Ctatist policies.

parties have relied heavily on the state to bring applies particularly to the French CP-suggests

only very weakly. In effect, the increasing overlap of which may or may not have reached the point of

leaves the left in a strikingly

negative posture.

The strategies

which they

have been following concern either the destruction of the structures of capitalism and only vague details about what to put in place of what has been destroyed, or-as with the Italian CP-it is about making the existing system operate more effectively. What no Eurocommunist party has yet begun to consider seriously is the proposition that capitalism significant

is only a partial aspect of the Western politico-economic system, that areas of it are already run by the state (or always have been) and that the

entrepreneurial ethos that results in the exploitation of labour is as much of a legend as a reality. The Eurocommunists need their constitutive myths for legitimacy and the existence of the ‘wicked capitalist’ is essential for the mobilization of political support; if he does not actually exist in real life, a simulacrum will do. This, it would seem, might well be the reason why the distinction seldom made. The last question to be examined many have seen as the touchstone

between socialism and anti-capitalism

is so

in this review is the problem of Leninism, which of Eurocommunist sincerity. Leninism can be

broken down in many ways, but for present purposes it may be considered

as various

facets of organization, style and language, and loyalty to the Soviet Union. These books have a great deal to say on the latter topic, and they generally agree that whereas the French CP has retained its rather close emotional and political links with Moscow, even while sometimes ready to criticize it, this is less true of the Italians and the Spaniards. The Portuguese CP, which receives a surprising amount of coverage, is not, of course, a Eurocommunist party. Curiously, the Finnish CP, which deserves far more attention than it has had in these collections, which Eurocommunists have had to tackle. As far as organization democratic

centralism,

is concerned,

there

exemplifies has been

many of the problems

some

loosening

notably in the Italian CP, which practices something

of strict like intra-

party debating, but on the whole, the Soviet system adopted in the 1920s remains unmodified. Style and language have likewise been retained as a distinctive communist characteristic by these parties. The abandonment of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ as a central party principle has generally been regarded as the Rubicon in this context. The moral drawn from these studies is that the language and style of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ can be jettisoned, but it takes a fair amount of time before the underlying structures adapt to the changed circumstances. The importance of this rests in the way in which language and style can actually shape the way in which the political agenda is constructed, political problems tackled and solutions assessed. So perhaps the continuing attachment of Eurocommunist parties to this component of Leninism is a part of the answer to the question as to what makes Eurocommunism different from Social Democracy. Much the same applies to organization and internal democracy. Leninism has a strong hold on the French CP, but is declining in importance in Italy and Spain. This means that democratic centralism and strictly hierarchical approaches to issues (central command, grassroots obedience) are beginning to give way to something more recognizable as within the broad tradition of Western politics. But the transformation is very

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STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

slow. Although at first sight the contrasts between the French CP on the one hand and the Italian on the other look so substantial that an argument could be made for regarding them as qualitatively different, united only by an identical label, this may be a misleading conclusion. Later on this may well turn out to be an accurate prediction, but for the moment it looks much more as if these two parties are at very different points on the same spectrum. Whether this will remain the case cannot be assessed with any claim to accuracy, the socialist ‘project’ and onto another.

but the party that first begins to tackle some of the problems of in modern Europe is the one most likely to move off one spectrum